if you were in control is this where you'd spend your taxes?

We working folk have no choice but to pay our taxes. And, sorry to
say, we have no control over where it is spent. If we did, human
services, public education and health care for all would be funded far
more than efforts to prop up despots in the world's dictatorships.
The following article is lengthy, and you might want to skip through
it, but it gives a sense of why we Americans are falling behind other
nations in the dispensation of human services.
Carl Jarvis
****

Glenn Greenwald
November 21 2018, 10:01 a.m.
The Intercept

Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a statement proclaiming that,
notwithstanding the anger toward the Saudi Crown Prince over the
gruesome murder of journalist
Jamal Khashoggi, "the United States intends to remain a steadfast
partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel
and all other
partners in the region." To justify his decision, Trump cited the fact
that "Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world"
and claimed
that "of the $450 billion [the Saudis plan to spend with U.S.
companies], $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military
equipment from Boeing,
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great U.S. defense contractors."

This statement instantly and predictably produced pompous
denunciations pretending that Trump's posture was a deviation from, a
grievous violation of,
long-standing U.S. values and foreign policy rather than what it
actually and obviously is: a perfect example – perhaps stated a little
more bluntly and
candidly than usual – of how the U.S. has conducted itself in the
world since at least the end of World War II.

The reaction was so intense because the fairy tale about the U.S.
standing up for freedom and human rights in the world is one of the
most pervasive and
powerful prongs of western propaganda, the one relied upon by U.S.
political and media elites to convince not just the U.S. population
but also themselves
of their own righteousness, even as they spend decades lavishing the
world's worst tyrants and despots with weapons, money, intelligence
and diplomatic
protection to carry out atrocities of historic proportions.

After all, if you have worked in high-level foreign policy positions
in Washington, or at the think thanks and academic institutions that
support those
policies, or in the corporate media outlets that venerate those who
rise to the top of those precincts (and which increasingly hire those
security state
officials as news analysts), how do you justify to yourself that
you're still a good person even though you arm, prop up, empower and
enable the world's
worst monsters, genocides, and tyrannies?

Simple: by pretending that you don't do any of that, that such acts
are contrary to your system of values, that you actually work to
oppose rather than
protect such atrocities, that you're a warrior and crusader for
democracy, freedom and human rights around the world.

That's the lie that you have to tell yourself: so that you can look in
the mirror without instantly feeling revulsion, so that you can show
your face in
decent society without suffering the scorn and ostracization that your
actions merit, so that you can convince the population over which you
have ruled
that the bombs you drop and the weapons with which you flood the world
are actually designed to help and protect people rather than slaughter
and oppress
them.

That's why it was so necessary – to the point of being more like a
physical reflex than a conscious choice – to react to Trump's Saudi
statement with contrived
anger and shock rather than admitting the truth that he was just
candidly acknowledging the core tenets of U.S. foreign policy for
decades. The people
who lied to the public and to themselves by pretending that Trump did
something aberrational rather than completely normal were engaged in
an act of self-preservation
as much as propagandistic deceit, though both motives were heavily at play.

The New York Times Editorial Page, as it so often does, topped the
charts with pretentious, scripted moral outrage. "President Trump
confirmed the harshest
caricatures drawn by America's most cynical critics on Tuesday when he
portrayed its central objectives in the world as panting after money
and narrow
self-interest," bellowed the paper, as though this view of U.S.
motives is some sort of jaded fiction invented by America-haters
rather than the only honest,
rational description of the country's despot-embracing posture in the
world during the lifespan of any human being alive today.

The paper's editorial writers were particularly shocked that "the
statement reflected Mr. Trump's view that all relationships are
transactional, and that
moral or human rights considerations must be sacrificed to a primitive
understanding of American national interests." To believe – or pretend
to believe
– that it is Mr. Trump who pioneered the view that the U.S. is willing
and eager to sanction murder and savagery by the regimes with which it
is most closely
aligned as long as such barbarism serves U.S interests signifies a
historical ignorance and/or a willingness to lie to one's own readers
so profound that
no human language is capable of expressing the depths of those
delusions. Has the New York Times Editorial Page ever heard of Henry
Kissinger?

So extensive is the active, constant and enthusiastic support by the
U.S. for the world's worst monsters and atrocities that
comprehensively citing them
all, in order to prove the ahistorical deceit of yesterday's reaction
to Trump's statement, would require a multi-volume book, not a mere
article. But
the examples are so vivid and clear that citing just a few will
suffice to make the point indisputable.

In April of this year, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the dictator of
Guatemala during the 1980s, died. The New York Times obituary, noting
that he had been convicted
of genocide for "trying to exterminate the Ixil ethnic group, a Mayan
Indian community whose villages were wiped out by his forces,"
explained that "in
the panoply of commanders who turned much of Central America into a
killing field in the 1980s, General Ríos Montt was one of the most
murderous." The
obituary added: "In his first five months in power, according to
Amnesty International, soldiers killed more than 10,000 peasants."

The genocide-committing General Rios Montt was a favorite of President
Ronald Reagan, one of the closest figures the U.S. has to a secular
saint, after
whom many monuments and national institutions are still named. Reagan
not only armed and funded Rios Montt but heaped praise on him far more
gushing than
anything Trump or Jared Kushner has said about the Saudi Crown Prince.
The Washington Post's Lou Cannon reported in 1982 that "on Air Force
One returning
to Andrews Air Force Base [from South America], [Reagan] said Rios
Montt had been getting 'a bum rap' and 'is totally dedicated to
democracy in Guatemala.'"

At a press conference standing next to the mass murderer, Reagan
hailed him as "a man of great personal integrity and commitment," who
really "wants to
improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social
justice." What about all those unfortunate acts of mass slaughter
against Guatemalan
peasants? That, said President Reagan, was justified, or at least
understandable, because the General was "faced with a challenge from
guerrillas armed
and supported from those outside Guatemala."

Trump's emphasis yesterday on the Saudis' value in opposing Iran
provoked particular anger. That anger is extremely odd given that the
iconic and notorious
photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein took
place in 1983, when Rumsfeld was dispatched to Baghdad to provide arms
and other weapons
to the Iraqi regime in order to help them fight Iran.

This trip, Al Jazeera noted when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, all
happened while "Iraq was at war with Iran and was using chemical
weapons. Human rights
abuses were practised on large sections of the Iraqi population." The
U.S. nonetheless "renewed the hand of friendship [with Saddam] through
the special
envoy Rumsfeld" because "Washington wanted Iraq's friendship to stymie
Iran" – exactly the rationale cited yesterday by Trump for continuing
friendly relations
with Riyadh (The Saudis "have been a great ally in our very important
fight against Iran," said Trump).

As for the Saudis themselves, they have long been committing
atrocities on par with and far worse than the Khashoggi killing both
within their borders
and outside, and their partnership with U.S. Presidents has only
flourished. As the Saudis beheaded dissidents and created the planet's
worst humanitarian
crisis by slaughtering Yemeni civilians without mercy or restraint,
President Obama not only authorized the sale of a record amount of
weapons to Saudi
tyrants, but also cut short his visit to India, the world's largest
democracy, where he was delivering lectures about the paramount
importance of human
rights and civic freedoms, in order to travel to Riyadh to meet with
top U.S. leaders from both political parties to pay homage to the
murderous Saudi
King who had just died (only in the last month of his presidency, with
an eye toward his legacy, did Obama restrict some arms to the Saudis
after allowing
those weapons to freely flow for eighteen months during the
destruction of Yemen).

UK Prime Minister David Cameron – perhaps Obama's only worthy
competitor when it came to simultaneously delivering preening speeches
about human rights
while arming the world's worst human rights abusers – actually ordered
UK flags flown at half-mast in honor of the noble Saudi despot. All of
this took
place at roughly the same time that Obama dispatched his top
officials, including his Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to pay homage
to the rulers of Bahrain
after they and the Saudis crushed a citizen uprising seeking greater freedoms.

In 2012, Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa came to
Washington – fresh off of massacring his own citizens seeking greater
freedoms – and,
in the words of Foreign Policy, "he left with hands full of gifts from
the U.S. State Department, which announced new arms sales to Bahrain
today." How
did the Obama administration justify all of this? By invoking exactly
the same rationale Trump cited yesterday for his ongoing support of
the Saudis: that
although the U.S. did not approve of such upsetting violence, its
"national security interests" compelled its ongoing support. From
Foreign Policy (italics
added):

The crown prince's son just graduated from American University, where
the Bahraini ruling family recently shelled out millions for a new
building at AU's
School of International Service. But while he was in town, the crown
prince met with a slew of senior U.S. officials and congressional
leaders, including
Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman
John Kerry, Senate
Armed Services Committee ranking Republican John McCain, as well as
several other Washington VIPs.

On Friday afternoon, the State Department announced it was moving
forward on a host of sales to the Bahraini Defense Forces, the
Bahraini National Guard,
and the Bahraini Coast Guard. The State Department said the decision
to move forward with the sales was made solely in the interest of U.S.
national security,
but outside experts see the move as meant to strengthen the crown
prince in his struggle inside the ruling family.

"We've made this decision, I want to emphasize, on national security
grounds," a senior administration official told reporters on a Friday
conference call.
"We've made this decision mindful of the fact that there remain a
number of serious, unresolved human rights issues in Bahrain, which we
expect the government
of Bahrain to address."

In 2011, Americans gathered around their TV sets to cheer the
inspiring Egyptian protesters gathering in Tahir Square to demand the
ouster of the brutal
Egyptian tyrant Hosni Mubarak. Most TV announcers neglected to remind
excited American viewers that Mubarak had managed to remain in power
for so long
because their own government had propped him up with weapons, money
and intelligence. As Mona Eltahawy put it in the New York Times last
year: "Five American
administrations, Democratic and Republican, supported the Mubarak regime."

But in case anyone was confused about the U.S. posture toward this
incomparably heinous Egyptian dictator, Hillary Clinton stepped
forward to remind everyone
of how U.S. officials have long viewed such tyrants. When asked in an
interview about how her own State Department had documented Egypt's
record of severe,
relentless human rights abuses and whether this might affect her
friendship with its rulers, Secretary Clinton gushed: "I really
consider President and
Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often
here in Egypt and in the United States."

How can anyone pretend that Trump's praise for the Saudis is some kind
of aberration when Hillary Clinton literally heralded one of the
planet's most murderous
and violent despots as a personal friend of her family? A Washington
Post Editorial at the time proclaimed that "Clinton continues to
devalue and undermine
the U.S. diplomatic tradition of human rights advocacy" and that "she
appears oblivious to how offensive such statements are to the millions
of Egyptians
who loathe Mr. Mubarak's oppressive government and blame the United
States for propping it up."

But this just shows the repetitive, dreary game U.S. elites have been
playing for decades. Newspaper editorialists and think tank scholars
pretend that
the U.S. stands opposed to tyranny and despotism and feigns surprise
each time U.S. officials lend their support, weaponry and praise to
those same tyrants
and despots.

And lest anyone try to distinguish Trump's statement yesterday on the
ground that it was false – that it covered up for bad acts of despotic
allies by
refusing to admit the Crown Prince's guilt for Khashoggi's murder –
let us recall when Clinton's successor as Secretary of State, John
Kerry, defended
Mubarak's successor, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, by denying that he had
implemented "a coup" when he overthrew Egypt's elected President in
2013. Instead,
proclaimed Kerry, the Sisi-led Egyptian generals, by removing the
elected leader, were simply attempting to "restore democracy" – the
exact same lie told
by the New York Times Editorial Page when right-wing Venezuelan
generals in 2002 removed that country's elected President, Hugo
Chávez, only for that paper
to hail that coup as a restoration of democracy.

In 2015, as the human rights abuses of the Sisi regime worsened even
further, the New York Times reported: "with the United States worried
about militants
in Sinai and Libya who have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State,
American officials also signaled that they would not let their
concerns with human
rights stand in the way of increased security cooperation with Egypt."

Sound familiar? It should: it's exactly the rationale Trump invoked
yesterday to justify ongoing support for the Saudis. In 2015, the
Egyptian dictatorship
– as it was murdering dissidents en masse – openly celebrated the flow
of U.S. weapons to the regime:

None of this recent, ugly history – and this is only a tiny excerpt of
it (excluding, just to name a few examples, U.S. support for the 20th
Century's
greatest monsters from Indonesia's Suharto to death squads in El
Salvador and U.S. killing of its own citizens to U.S. support for
Israeli occupation and
apartheid) – justifies what Trump did on Tuesday. But what it does do
is give the lie to the flamboyant claims that Trump has somehow
vandalized and degraded
U.S. values and U.S. foreign policy rather than what he actually did:
upheld their core tenets and explained them to the public with great
candor and clarity.

This episode also exposes one of the great scams of the Trump era. The
very same people who have devoted their careers to supporting
despotism, empowering
tyranny, cheering on atrocities, and justifying U.S. imperialism are
masquerading as the exact opposite of what they are in order to pave
their path back
to power where they can continue to pursue all of the destructive and
amoral policies they now so grotesquely pretend to oppose.

Anyone who objects to exposure of this deceit – anyone who invokes
empty clichés such as "whataboutism" or "hypocrisy is the tribute vice
pays to virtue"
in order to enable this scam to go undetected – has no business
staking moral claim to any values of truth or freedom. People who
demand that this deceit
go unnoticed are revealing themselves as what they are: purely
situational opponents of tyranny and murder who pretend to hold such
values only when doing
so undermines their domestic political opponents and enables their
political allies to be restored to power where they can continue the
same policies of
murder, tyranny-support and atrocity-enabling that they have spent
decades defending.

If you want to denounce Trump's indifference to Saudi atrocities on
moral, ethical or geo-political grounds – and I find them
objectionable on all of those
grounds – by all means do so. But pretending that he's done something
that is at odds with U.S. values or the actions of prior leaders or
prevailing foreign
policy orthodoxies is not just deceitful but destructive.

It ensures that these very same policies will endure: by dishonestly
pretending that they are unique to Trump, rather than the hallmarks of
the same people
now being applauded because they are denouncing Trump's actions in
such a blatantly false voice, all to mask the fact that they did the
same, and worse,
when they commanded the levers of American power.

Re: [blind-democracy] All in the Family. Not

We will continue losing ground until we deal with the root issue.
Even back over 2,000 years ago our Ancestors put profit ahead of
People. Wouldn't you consider Judas to be in the mode of our modern
Corporate Capitalist, Donald Trump? 30 pieces of silver may not be in
the same ball park as 400 Billions of dollars, but both sold out
another human for profit. For the first time in my life I'm forced
to say that I am ashamed to be an American. And I sure will not
travel abroad.

Carl Jarvis



On 11/21/18, peter altschul <paltschul@centurytel.net> wrote:
> Amending the U.S. Constitution to Protect our Republic
>
> George Mullen Nov 15, 2018 2:35 PM Townhall.com
> The time has come for a new Amendment to be added to the U.S.
> Constitution in order to protect our Republic from an
> unrecognized yet significant rising danger. If we don't do so
> (and soon), we may one day experience our own version of a
> Caesarean dictatorship. Ancient Rome was a republic as
> well...for centuries in fact...bbf the Caesars subverted it into
> a bloodline monarchy. As unlikely as this risk may seem in
> America today, our increasing political polarization may be
> foreshadowing something ominous. And if such did transpire, it
> would come with political assassinations and our own unique
> versions of Caligula, Nero, and Commodus.
> We certainly don't want such a future for our children and
> grandchildren. By adopting a simple but profound preventative
> measure now, we can protect our Republic for centuries to come.
> Let me explain the nature of this pressing issue:
> For the first 175 years of our Republic since George
> Washington's 1789 inauguration, the risk of a bloodline monarchy
> was minimal. The presidencies of John Adams and son John Quincy
> Adams were the only small hint of danger that went unrepeated
> until the modern era. However, since the 1960s, we have
> witnessed an alarming rise in the inclination toward embracing
> family political dynasties. This rise coincides directly with
> the invention and proliferation of television, mobile phones, and
> the Internet. Mass-media now projects everywhere non-stop,
> creating a near-insurmountable name-advantage for political
> incumbents. It's one thing when we are talking about an
> incumbency advantage for 535 members of Congress who are
> relentlessly jockeying against each other for influence. It's
> quite another matter when we are talking about the President, an
> office of one and America's head of state.
>
> This incumbency name-advantage is magnified a billion-fold at the
> presidential level - thus the reason the same family names keep
> re-appearing on our presidential tickets.
> The first political dynasty to surface in this mass-media era
> was John F. Kennedy and brothers Robert and Ted, followed by
> George H. W. Bush and sons George and Jeb, followed by Bill
> Clinton and wife Hillary. The Kennedy, Bush, and Clinton
> families are all still vying for dynastic power. An Obama
> dynasty may be in the offing as well - there is already talk of
> Michelle Obama running in 2020. Likewise, a Trump dynasty may be
> imminent - and many believe this one would shatter the Republic.
> Ivanka 2024?
> America has gone from effectively no family political dynasties
> over its first 175 years...ffperh five vying for power today.
> This strangely echoes Ancient Rome near the end of its republic,
> when powerful families led by Caesar (Julius), Pompey, Crassus,
> Antony, Lepidus and Caesar (Augustus) were competing for power.
>
> Furthermore, America's fascination with the British Monarchy
> continues to grow - an ironic trend, considering that the
> American Revolution was fought to escape this same monarchy. It
> would seem that, deep down, many Americans want a monarchy of
> their own - perhaps as a reality show of sorts to watch. The
> media ratings for Prince Harry's recent royal wedding support
> this suspicion.
>
> Make no mistake, America's flirtation with dynastic family rule
> is a slippery first step toward monarchy, and, potentially,
> dictatorship. Did our Founding Fathers envision a bloodline
> monarchy in America? Dynastic family rule? A Juan Peron and Evita
> Peron couples-style of leadership?
> Certainly not. This is why we need to add an additional
> guardrail to our Constitution. And there is precedent for doing
> so - Amendment XXII was adopted in response to President Franklin
> Roosevelt's four presidential terms and the monarchical danger
> such could pose to the Republic.
> The crux of a proposed 28th Amendment for the protection of our
> Republic is simple, non-partisan, and holds sacred the 1776 and
> 1787 goals of preventing a monarchy or dictatorship from taking
> hold in America. Likewise, this Amendment would prevent dynastic
> family rule, which emanates from name recognition and political
> connections, not from merit or ideas. America wants the best
> leaders and ideas available - dynastic rule produces
> power-motivated leaders who circumvent the system by using their
> 'name' as their qualifier.
>
> The United States is the richest, most powerful, and most
> innovative nation in the world, and is home to a population of
> 325 million people. The notion that two of its presidents would
> (or should) ever need to descend from the same family is an
> arrogant power-grab by those who attempt it, and is ultimately
> dangerous to the viability of our Republic. As such, I suggest:
> Amendment XXVIII (proposed): "No two persons from an immediate
> family shall be elected (or appointed) as President or Vice
> President of the United States of America. In this context,
> immediate family is defined as including spouses (previous and
> current), domestic partners (previous and current), parents
> (natural and adopted), children (natural and adopted),
> grandchildren (natural and adopted), and siblings (natural and
> adopted). The spouses and domestic partners (previous and
> current) of children, grandchildren, and siblings are also
> included."
>
> Some will argue this is unfair in America, where every citizen
> should be able to reach the highest office of the land. Others
> will argue that these choices should be in the voter's hands.
> There is merit to both arguments. However, this is about
> protecting the viability of the American Republic...and there are
> precedents for adopting such safeguards:
> U.S. Constitution (1787): "No person except a natural born
> Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the
> Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of
> President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office
> who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and
> been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
> Amendment XXII (1951): "No person shall be elected to the
> office of the President more than twice, and no person who has
> held the office of President, or acted as President, for more
> than two years of a term to which some other person was elected
> President shall be elected to the office of the President more
> than once."
> These constitutional passages establish eligibility rules that
> disqualify more than 20 million U.S. citizens from ever becoming
> president, and likewise, eliminate choices from voter's hands -
> all in order to protect the Republic.
> Amendment XXVIII would be simply doing the same, but in this
> case, would only disqualify a few hundred people.
> For the long-term viability of our Republic, the adoption of
> this Amendment may prove essential.
>
>

Re: [blind-democracy]Amazon: Corporate Capitalism on Steroids

Good Friday to All Amazon Lovers...and Mississippi Lovers, too!
Amazon, Face Book, Google, Micro Soft along with other Mega
Corporations, are intently gobbling up what is left of democracy.
Our elected officials, assisted by the financial support from such
giant corporations, tell us that we elected them to lead. They tell
us that we don't understand how giving away our tax dollars will make
us wildly rich. The odds of that happening are about as good as
buying a Lottery ticket. It's time we recalled all of those simple
minded fools, and put in place those elected officials who will be
better stewards of our tax dollars.
Carl Jarvis

On 11/16/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Why Amazon Wants a Piece of Our Political and Financial Capitals
>
> Maryland GovPics / CC BY 2.0
>
> Amazon made its long-awaited announcement this week, revealing where it
> will
> site its second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. The selection process pitted over
> 200 cities against each other, vying for the prospect of hosting the new
> corporate campus with its promised 50,000 well-paying, white-collar jobs.
> Politicians prostrated themselves before the online behemoth and its
> CEO/founder, Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, as they competed to
> lavish
> the company with as many enticing public subsidies and tax breaks as
> possible. The winning city would flourish, they hoped, with increasing tax
> revenues and the emergence of a vibrant tech hub to rival Silicon Valley.
> In
> the end, Amazon announced that HQ2 would be divided into two smaller
> locations, one in Queens, New York, and the other in Crystal City,
> Virginia.
> While the details of the publicly financed subsidies remain shrouded, what
> is known so far is enough to confirm the worst fears of Amazon's many
> critics: The HQ2 auction was, at best, a boondoggle, yet another example of
> corporate welfare, transferring wealth from working-class taxpayers to a
> massive corporation and its billionaire owner.
>
> "I am absolutely outraged that New York, under Governor Cuomo, is willing
> to
> give away up to $3 billion of taxpayers' money without any consultation,"
> progressive Democratic New York state Assembly Member Ron Kim said on the
> "Democracy Now!" news hour, the day after Cuomo and New York City Mayor
> Bill
> de Blasio released details of New York City's winning bid for the
> scaled-down HQ2. "I'm introducing legislation to claw back this deal," he
> continued. "What's the point of having a majority progressive Democrat
> state
> Senate, that we worked so hard for in the state of New York, if we can't
> stop one man from transferring $3 billion of taxpayers' money to the
> richest
> man on this planet?" Kim was referring to last week's Democratic Party
> takeover of the New York state Senate for only the third time in the past
> half-century. Along with the Democrat-controlled Assembly in which he
> serves, Kim is optimistic that the generous subsidies can be rescinded.
>
> Time magazine calculated that it takes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos only nine
> seconds to earn $28,000, what the median Amazon worker earns in a year.
> Greg
> LeRoy of Good Jobs First has long watchdogged what he calls "persistent
> megadeals" like New York and Virginia's courting of HQ2. "It's another
> example of Amazon getting paid to do what it would have done anyway," he
> said on "Democracy Now!" "It wanted to be in the financial capital of the
> world and the political capital of the country, so no surprises about its
> location. We're massively subsidizing, yet again, a company to do what it
> wants to do anyway."
>
> In response to de Blasio's claim that HQ2 will provide opportunities "for
> tens of thousands of New Yorkers, everyday New Yorkers, kids who come up
> through our public schools, kids who go to our community colleges and our
> four-year colleges," LeRoy says that "four out of five, typically, of the
> new job takers at a project like this will not be current residents of New
> York or Arlington [Virginia]. They will be people moving to the area from
> outside. That means a lot of growth getting induced, a lot of schools
> having
> to be expanded and infrastructure built and public services provided." All
> these paid for by the taxpayers, not by Amazon.
>
>
>
> LeRoy also notes that Amazon "is the biggest cloud computing company in the
> world. It has roughly a 40 percent market share. And among its most
> lucrative clients in that space are the Pentagon and the Central
> Intelligence Agency and other federal agencies." That's why the other HQ2
> is
> planned for Crystal City, Virginia - as LeRoy says, "very close -
> literally,
> practically a stone's throw from - the Pentagon."
>
> "Amazon Doesn't Just Want to Dominate the Market - It Wants to Become the
> Market," read a headline for a Nation article written by Stacy Mitchell of
> the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. "It's now capturing one out of every
> two dollars that Americans spend online," she said on "Democracy Now!"
> Additionally, it kills small businesses. "We're losing about two retail
> jobs
> for every one job created in an Amazon warehouse," she said. The central
> threat, she added, is that "Amazon is about controlling the essential
> infrastructure that other companies need to use in order to reach the
> market
> . if you're any company producing or retailing anything, increasingly, if
> you want to be able to reach consumers, you have to become a seller on
> Amazon's platform. And what that means is that Amazon now controls your
> business."
>
> Jeff Bezos originally called his company "Cadabra," as in "abracadabra,"
> but, legend has it, his lawyer told him it sounded too much like "cadaver."
> Will Amazon's HQ2 spark a magical, high-tech age in Queens, or will it kill
> small businesses, drive up rents and leave the cadaver of a working-class
> neighborhood in its wake?
>
>
> Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
> Truthdig
> Amy Goodman
>
>
>
>

how deep is our prejudice?

My first wife's mother, and many in her family, would see a Black man
coming down the sidewalk, and they would cross the street out of fear.
My neighbor had tried to sell his house for some months.  Finally he
listed with a realtor who showed properties to Blacks as well as to
the White folk.  My sweet neighbor on the other side of the house for
sale, came knocking at my door one early morning.
"Last night Dick and Jane(yup, that's their real names) showed their
house to some Colored folks.  "Dick and Jane are asking far too much
for any sensible folks to buy it", I told her.
Sure enough, the house set empty for months, finally selling to a
White single mother with 3 young children.  But my inlaws, who lived
three blocks from our house, got wind of this "invasion".  "What would
you do if some big Black man jumped out in the alley and grabbed
Judy?" my mother-in-law asked me.
"Well," I said after some consideration, "I'd do the same thing as if
a Big Green Man jumped out in the alley and grabbed Judy.  I'd call
for help!"
There was an unspoken fear in that neighborhood that we would be
invaded by Colored Folk.  My father-in-law told me with a straight
face, "If one moves in, they come like a plague, and our property will
devalue by half.
And yet, two blocks on the other side of me lived a young couple and
their two young daughters.  These folks were both school teachers.
They dressed well and kept an immaculate home and yard.  Shortly after
they moved in, their two daughters passed by our house on their way to
our church, for Sunday School.  They went back the next week.  They
never went again.  Our church family did not want Blacks included.
A middle aged Mexican fellow came into church one day and sat in the
pew at the back.  No one sat next to him.  The next Sunday he was
there again.  Following church service, I went to him and asked if he
lived close by.  He said he was in a small apartment in the
neighborhood, and was saving his money doing yard work so he could
bring his wife and two children here.  I told him I could use some
yard work, and invited him to Thanksgiving dinner.
The next Sunday several concerned folks came up to me following
church.  "Did you really invite that man to Thanksgiving Dinner?
Weren't you afraid he might rob you?  Didn't you think about Judy and
your little daughter?"  The next Spring I called on this man again,
and for the next two summers he did our lawn and flower beds.  Then
one day he came by with a couple of children, and in his truck was his
wife.  "You helped me bring my family together, and I just wanted you
to meet them, and to thank you for your kindness."
And all the while, my Holy neighbors tucked their Bibles under their
arms and walked piously to Church, to Praise the Lord!
How deeply ingrained is our prejudices?  Just go out and walk around
for a while.

Carl Jarvis

how deep is our prejudice?

how deep is our prejudice?

the freedom torch burns low

One by one our strongest defenders of Freedom are taken down. If they
were all herded together and murdered, the cry for vengeance would
ring out. But taken down singly, all that is heard is the whisper of
a whimper.

Carl Jarvis

*****

Crucifying Julian Assange

Mr. Fish / Truthdig

Julian Assange's sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has been
transformed into a little shop of horrors. He has been largely cut off from
communicating with the outside world for the last seven months. His
Ecuadorian citizenship, granted to him as an asylum seeker, is in the
process of being revoked. His health is failing. He is being denied medical
care. His efforts for legal redress have been crippled by the gag rules,
including Ecuadorian orders that he cannot make public his conditions inside
the embassy in fighting revocation of his Ecuadorian citizenship.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has refused to intercede on behalf
of Assange, an Australian citizen, even though the new government in
Ecuador, led by Lenín Moreno—who calls Assange an "inherited problem" and an
impediment to better relations with Washington—is making the WikiLeaks
founder's life in the embassy unbearable. Almost daily, the embassy is
imposing harsher conditions for Assange, including making him pay his
medical bills, imposing arcane rules about how he must care for his cat and
demanding that he perform a variety of demeaning housekeeping chores.

The Ecuadorians, reluctant to expel Assange after granting him political
asylum and granting him citizenship, intend to make his existence so
unpleasant he will agree to leave the embassy to be arrested by the British
and extradited to the United States. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael
Correa, whose government granted the publisher political asylum, describes
Assange's current living conditions as "torture."

His mother, Christine Assange, said in  a recent video appeal, "Despite
Julian being a multi-award-winning journalist, much loved and respected for
courageously exposing serious, high-level crimes and corruption in the
public interest, he is right now alone, sick, in pain—silenced in solitary
confinement, cut off from all contact and being tortured in the heart of
London. The modern-day cage of political prisoners is no longer the Tower of
London. It's the Ecuadorian Embassy."

"Here are the facts," she went on. "Julian has been detained nearly eight
years without charge. That's right. Without charge. For the past six years,
the U.K. government has refused his request for access to basic health
needs, fresh air, exercise, sunshine for vitamin D and access to proper
dental and medical care. As a result, his health has seriously deteriorated.
His examining doctors warned his detention conditions are life-threatening.
A slow and cruel assassination is taking place before our very eyes in the
embassy in London."

"In 2016, after an in-depth investigation, the United Nations ruled that
Julian's legal and human rights have been violated on multiple occasions,"
she said. "He'd been illegally detained since 2010. And they ordered his
immediate release, safe passage and compensation. The U.K. government
refused to abide by the U.N.'s decision. The U.S. government has made
Julian's arrest a priority. They want to get around a U.S. journalist's
protection under the First Amendment by charging him with espionage. They
will stop at nothing to do it."

"As a result of the U.S. bearing down on Ecuador, his asylum is now under
immediate threat," she said. "The U.S. pressure on Ecuador's new president
resulted in Julian being placed in a strict and severe solitary confinement
for the last seven months, deprived of any contact with his family and
friends. Only his lawyers could see him. Two weeks ago, things became
substantially worse. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, who
rightfully gave Julian political asylum from U.S. threats against his life
and liberty, publicly warned when U.S. Vice President Mike Pence recently
visited Ecuador a deal was done to hand Julian over to the U.S. He stated
that because of the political costs of expelling Julian from their embassy
was too high, the plan was to break him down mentally. A new, impossible,
inhumane protocol was implemented at the embassy to torture him to such a
point that he would break and be forced to leave."

Assange was once feted and courted by some of the largest media
organizations in the world, including The New York Times and The Guardian,
for the information he possessed. But once his trove of material documenting
U.S. war crimes, much of it provided by Chelsea Manning, was published by
these media outlets he was pushed aside and demonized. A leaked Pentagon
document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch dated
March 8, 2008, exposed a black propaganda campaign to discredit WikiLeaks
and Assange. The document said the smear campaign should seek to destroy the
"feeling of trust" that is WikiLeaks' "center of gravity" and blacken
Assange's reputation. It largely has worked. Assange is especially vilified
for publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials. The Democrats and former
FBI Director James Comey say the emails were copied from the accounts of
John Podesta, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, by
Russian government hackers. Comey has said the messages were probably
delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary. Assange has said the emails were
not provided by "state actors."

The Democratic Party—seeking to blame its election defeat on Russian
"interference" rather than the grotesque income inequality, the betrayal of
the working class, the loss of civil liberties, the deindustrialization and
the corporate coup d'état that the party helped orchestrate—attacks Assange
as a traitor, although he is not a U.S. citizen. Nor is he a spy. He is not
bound by any law I am aware of to keep U.S. government secrets. He has not
committed a crime. Now, stories in newspapers that once published material
from WikiLeaks focus on his allegedly slovenly behavior—not evident during
my visits with him—and how he is, in the words of The Guardian, "an
unwelcome guest" in the embassy. The vital issue of the rights of a
publisher and a free press is ignored in favor of snarky character
assassination.

Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to
Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense charges that were eventually
dropped. Assange feared that once he was in Swedish custody he would be
extradited to the United States. The British government has said that,
although he is no longer wanted for questioning in Sweden, Assange will be
arrested and jailed for breaching his bail conditions if he leaves the
embassy.

WikiLeaks and Assange have done more to expose the dark machinations and
crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. Assange, in
addition to exposing atrocities and crimes committed by the United States
military in our endless wars and revealing the inner workings of the Clinton
campaign, made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National
Security Agency, their surveillance programs and their interference in
foreign elections, including in the French elections. He disclosed the
conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour
members of Parliament. And WikiLeaks worked swiftly to save Edward Snowden,
who exposed the wholesale surveillance of the American public by the
government, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from
Hong Kong to Moscow. The Snowden leaks also revealed, ominously, that
Assange was on a U.S. "manhunt target list."

What is happening to Assange should terrify the press. And yet his plight is
met with indifference and  sneering contempt. Once he is pushed out of the
embassy, he will be put on trial in the United States for what he published.
This will set a new and dangerous legal precedent that the Trump
administration and future administrations will employ against other
publishers, including those who are part of the mob trying to lynch Assange.
The silence about the treatment of Assange is not only a betrayal of him but
a betrayal of the freedom of the press itself. We will pay dearly for this
complicity.

Even if the Russians provided the Podesta emails to Assange, he should have
published them. I would have. They exposed practices of the Clinton
political machine that she and the Democratic leadership sought to hide. In
the two decades I worked overseas as a foreign correspondent I was routinely
leaked stolen documents by organizations and governments. My only concern
was whether the documents were forged or genuine. If they were genuine, I
published them. Those who leaked material to me included the rebels of the
Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN); the Salvadoran army, which
once gave me blood-smeared FMLN documents found after an ambush; the
Sandinista government of Nicaragua; the Israeli intelligence service, the
Mossad; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Central Intelligence
Agency; the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebel group; the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO); the French intelligence service, Direction
Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, or DGSE; and the Serbian government of
Slobodan Milosovic, who was later tried as a war criminal.

We learned from the emails published by WikiLeaks that the Clinton
Foundation received millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of
the major funders of Islamic State. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton
paid her donors back by approving $80 billion in weapons sales to Saudi
Arabia, enabling the kingdom to carry out a devastating war in Yemen that
has triggered a humanitarian crisis, including widespread food shortages and
a cholera epidemic, and left close to 60,000 dead. We learned Clinton was
paid $675,000 for speaking at Goldman Sachs, a sum so massive it can only be
described as a bribe. We learned Clinton told the financial elites in her
lucrative talks that she wanted "open trade and open borders" and believed
Wall Street executives were best-positioned to manage the economy, a
statement that directly contradicted her campaign promises. We learned the
Clinton campaign worked to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that
Donald Trump was the Republican nominee. We learned Clinton obtained advance
information on primary-debate questions. We learned, because 1,700 of the
33,000 emails came from Hillary Clinton, she was the primary architect of
the war in Libya. We learned she believed that the overthrow of Moammar
Gadhafi would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. The war
she sought has left Libya in chaos, seen the rise to power of radical
jihadists in what is now a failed state, triggered a massive exodus of
migrants to Europe, seen Libyan weapon stockpiles seized by rogue militias
and Islamic radicals throughout the region, and resulted in 40,000 dead.
Should this information have remained hidden from the American public? You
can argue yes, but you can't then call yourself a journalist.

"They are setting my son up to give them an excuse to hand him over to the
U.S., where he would face a show trial," Christine Assange warned. "Over the
past eight years, he has had no proper legal process. It has been unfair at
every single turn with much perversion of justice. There is no reason to
consider that this would change in the future. The U.S. WikiLeaks grand
jury, producing the extradition warrant, was held in secret by four
prosecutors but no defense and no judge. The U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty
allows for the U.K. to extradite Julian to the U.S. without a proper basic
case. Once in the U.S., the National Defense Authorization Act allows for
indefinite detention without trial. Julian could very well be held in
Guantanamo Bay and tortured, sentenced to 45 years in a maximum-security
prison, or face the death penalty. My son is in critical danger because of a
brutal, political persecution by the bullies in power whose crimes and
corruption he had courageously exposed when he was editor in chief of
WikiLeaks."

Assange is on his own. Each day is more difficult for him. This is by
design. It is up to us to protest. We are his last hope, and the last hope,
I fear, for a free press.

"We need to make our protest against this brutality deafening," his mother
said. "I call on all you journalists to stand up now because he's your
colleague and you are next. I call on all you politicians who say you
entered politics to serve the people to stand up now. I call on all you
activists who support human rights, refugees, the environment, and are
against war, to stand up now because WikiLeaks has served the causes that
you spoke for and Julian is now suffering for it alongside of you. I call on
all citizens who value freedom, democracy and a fair legal process to put
aside your political differences and unite, stand up now. Most of us don't
have the courage of our whistleblowers or journalists like Julian Assange
who publish them, so that we may be informed and warned about the abuses of
power."
Chris Hedges